General
Mark Jury, Whose Photography Captured War and Death, Dies at 80
He created one of the first photo books about the Vietnam War — the first “rock ’n’ roll war,” he called it — and later documented his grandfather’s struggle with dementia.
Mark Jury, a photographer whose searing, intimate images from the battlefields of South Vietnam and the deathbed of his coal miner grandfather filled the pages of two critically acclaimed books in the 1970s, died on Aug. 27 in Scranton, Pa. He was 80.
His daughter Hillary Jury said the cause of death, in a hospital, was heart failure.
Mr. Jury’s first photo collection, “The Vietnam Photo Book” (1971), was one of the earliest to offer a visually unblinking view of what he called “the first and only rock ’n’ roll war,” by which he meant a conflict, at least on the American side, marked not by ideology or interests but by debauchery, moral corruption and pure desperation to survive.
By the time he arrived in South Vietnam as an Army photographer in 1969, the war had lost any sense of meaning for the hundreds of thousands of men and women fighting it. They fought well, he later wrote, but were also frequently drunk or stoned; peace signs and long hair proliferated.
Mr. Jury captured in film the nightmarish war that Michael Herr later wrote about in “Dispatches” (1977), his personal account as a war correspondent, and what Francis Ford Coppola depicted in “Apocalypse Now” (1979). As in the famous “Ride of the Valkyries” scene from early in that movie, Mr. Jury recalled being on a helicopter diving in for an attack, during which the pilot played the Beatles’ “Happiness Is a Warm Gun” over the radio.
